Rev. Dr. IRVING, in moving the resolution, "That the Report be received, and the thanks of the Members and Associates be presented to the Council, Officers and Auditors for their efficient conduct of the business of the Institute during the past year," said-I do not know that the report calls for any special remarks, except it be regretted that the number of Members and Associates has not increased this year so much as we could have wished. A year or two ago I was called upon to speak in this room on a similar subject and I expressed the hope that the falling off of clerical members was only temporary; and I would venture to express the hope still that we shall have an increase in the near future, and that the Society will have an increase of clerical members; for my studies, which try to stride the double horse of science and theology, have led me to feel very strongly that it is mainly in the ranks of the clergy that the work of this Society is likely to bear good fruit. Only within the last two or three weeks the readers of the Guardian newspaper have probably noticed that my unworthy name has appeared. In one case I had a severe castigation administered to me by a brilliant writer on the theological side, who has made himself to some extent acquainted with science, because of the audacity on my part in venturing to put in a postscript to a letter-an important letter bearing upon New Testament Exegesis-uttering a warning to those who had not been serious students of science against dealing too freely in scientific phraseology, because I hold that the cause of truth is not advanced in that way. The castigation I received at the first moment seemed too funny, but of course the answer was very easy, and I have answered Canon MacColl.

Several years ago I took an opportunity of writing to Dr. Creighton, Bishop of London, a very strong letter on the great importance of the clergy being trained so as to be in sympathy with the forward movement and thought of this twentieth century, and he entirely agreed with me; but declared there was no energy to spare for great intellectual issues for a man in his position.

I venture to say it would be a good thing if all influential members would try and induce more clergy into our ranks. They have the ear of the public in a privileged way, and it is painful to find preachers beginning to talk about science and dealing with scientific things when they are out of their depth.

B

I move that this report read by the Secretary be received, and the thanks of the Members and Associates be presented to the Council, the Honorary Officers and Auditors for their efficient conduct of the business of the Institute during the year. I need not add more than this, my strong appreciation of the way in which Professor Hull discharges his duties with great enthusiasm.

Mr. WOODFORD PILKINGTON, M.Inst.C.E.-Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen: It affords me great pleasure this afternoon in having been asked to second the adoption of this report. I have attended with very great pleasure the reading of several papers mentioned in this report, and I think that this Institute holds a most distinguished and exceptional place in the Institutes of like character, inasmuch as it takes up morals and ethics, and devotes itself also to that very necessary work that a former speaker has alluded to, the connection between science and religion, showing the absolute truth of what is revealed to us in connection with science in the Bible. I do not know of any other Institute that devotes itself in a like way to that broad subject with so much success as this does. I am certain that this Institute on that account alone has come to stay and increase its members.

It is not within the province of a seconder to take up much time in seconding the proposal, and therefore this afternoon I simply conclude with what I have already stated, and second the adoption of this report and the thanks of the members which are included in the motion.

The resolution having been put from the chair and carried,

Colonel HENDLEY replied.-On behalf of my colleagues I thank you for the kind way in which you have received this resolution. We feel that the work devolves most upon the Secretary, but you can show your gratitude by increasing the number of members, by recommending the Society to your friends.

The CHAIRMAN.-I have great pleasure in asking Professor Silvanus Thompson, D.Sc., F.R.S., to give us the address which he has prepared.

RECONSTRUCTION AND RESTATEMENT.

By Dr. SILVANUS P. THOMPSON, F.R.S.

TOWEVER inadequate may be some of the arguments employed by advocates of the school of philosophy styling itself Monism, there is undoubtedly a bottom truth underlying the idea that life is in its widest sense one. Nature is not infinitely divorced from art; matter is separable from form; thought is not indefinitely remote from energy; nor is the gulf between religion and science incapable of being bridged over. Faith and reason are not mutually incompatible, however different may seem at first sight the provinces in which each appears supreme. For neither is the human being constructed with intellectual bulkheads which prevent intercommunication between the faculties, nor is man's nature so delimited off from the nature of other kinds of organic life as to preclude the direct interaction of forces whether physical or psychic. Man is in fact to an extent more largely understood in recent times than of yore, a product of his environment. Religion is a part of that environment, and has had no small share in moulding man to that which morally, socially, and intellectually he is to-day. He has been slowly learning the laws of the physical part of his environment; he is also, but more slowly, learning those of the spiritual part. If of late he has been beginning to understand that the physical part of his environment, the world of things and forces, is not so exclusively dominant as his teachers of thirty years ago would have had him think; and if he has become more willing to admit the existence of moral and spiritual things as a complement to the physical cosmos, he has also had his eyes opened to see that in the world of moral and spiritual forces there is a call for the play of his trained reason. The widening of outlook on the physical side finds its counterpart on the moral and religious side. The development which has brought about the reconstitution of science involves in fact a restatement of religion.

Man cannot remain stationary in a state of arrested development amidst the play of forces by which he is surrounded. Evolution takes its course whether he is conscious of it or not; its operations are not dependent, save to a very secondary degree, upon his will or his consciousness. The child

grows, and his growth is effected by food, climate, air and light, independently of his consciousness or will. The development of his mind and of his moral nature for good or ill is very largely determined by his surroundings. What is true of the individual is true also of the race; and its development physical, intellectual, moral and religious, is, whether acknowledged or not, unquestionably dependent upon environment. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. The very condition of life is changed. Decay and death are processes inseparable in the order of nature from the possibility of life. And this is true also of intellectual and religious life. No advance in thought is possible without involving some change, some abandonment of earlier, less advanced thought. In ethics as in morals, men advance as on stepping stones from their dead selves." In religious thought no progress is possible, save by the renunciation of some earlier beliefs, once held sacred in the childhood of the race. Not that eternal truth changes, but man's appreciation or perception of it does. Newer revelations supersede old ones, or furnish proof that part of that which, in the childhood of the race, had been taken for revelation was rather revelation misinterpreted by human minds; treasure in earthen vessels; wisdom but half understood, and admixed with human imagination. The problems of one age differ from those of another: the temptations of one age may differ from those of another. It may be easy to mistake, amid different surroundings, the precise import of words uttered to men of a former time; for words theinselves change their meanings and connote different ideas to men of different generations. If for no other reason than this, it is needful from time to time that there should be restatements of the things held to be true; for if the statement persists when the meanings of its terms have changed, the statement ceases to be entirely true even though the truth it is supposed to state remains unchanged. All this may be admitted, nay, must be admitted, by the reverent and intelligent seeker after truth. And the greater his reverence for truth, the more freely will he make the admission.

The fact is that here, in the twentieth century, we do not stand precisely in the same position as our fathers stood in the nineteenth, or our forefathers in the centuries before. The steamengine and the printing-press, the telegraph and the dynamo, the telescope and the microscope, the camera and the spectroscope, have wrought revolutions not only in the material aspect of town and country but in the thoughts of men concerning the material world in which they live. During the last sixty years

or so in particular, men's minds have widened. The outlook in the physical, the biological, and the historical sciences subtends a vastly greater angle than heretofore; while the means of observation have multiplied, the instruments of research are far more powerful and more numerous, and the storehouse of accumulated facts awaiting co-ordination is overwhelmingly full. We have learned both how great the universe is and how small; what a microcosm after all is the solar system, what a macrocosm the structure of the atom. We are able to discuss the chemistry of the stars. We can with our own eyes behold the skeleton within a living man, and see his heart beating-can even watch the progress of digestion in certain cases. We have learned how to preserve in permanency accurate automatic pictures of men and of events, and can register and even reproduce the tones of their actual speech. We have seen the air we breathe condensed into a liquid and frozen into a solid. We have been taught how to manufacture light out of electrical discharges. The synthesis by the chemist of organic substances proceeds in an ever-widening circle of triumphs. To-day we can manufacture by synthesis sugar and indigo; to-morrow it may be albumen or cellulose; protoplasm itself, though it may be far off, is not beyond the possibilities of which the chemist dreams. The mechanical theory of the universe, due to Kepler, and Newton, and Laplace, has been extended by the discovery of the principles of energy, and the formulation of them in the laws of thermodynamics. The sciences of optics and electricity have become one, being parts of the science of the ether. The discovery of the radio-activity of certain elements and minerals, with their singular emanations, has revealed a new and surprising field of research. The recognition of the electron has given a new basis to chemical hypothesis; and Dalton's atomic theory, which won its way by its general correspondence with observed facts, is being swallowed up in a chemistry still more fundamental.

If the vast complexity and beauty of the universe as it was known to our fathers could excite their wonder and imagination, how much more must ours be excited by the immense and marvellous development that has been opened in our time. But it is not alone in the physical sciences that such developments have come about. Biology has made advances almost equally great. The physical bases of life have been explored as never before. Diseases which formerly baffled the skill of the most experienced physician have been discovered to be due to specific micro-organisms; and we have learned how